Our Historic Home Renovation & Lifestyle Blog in Summerville, SC

October 30, 2015

Happy Fall Y’all!

Aloha!

Fall is here and I am so happy it is! Fall is probably my favorite time of year, I love breaking out my cute boots and scarves, wearing a dark lipstick and darkening my hair, turning off the A/C and opening up the windows, and my furkids usually love it as much as I do as we can all play outside! Although our summer was much easier to deal with here, than Arizona, everybody told us we would hate the humidity, but it really was not bad, can’t complain! These are some pics I took with the furkids last week on a perfect fall day! Our leaves haven’t quite turned yet, but I can’t wait until they do!

So what have we been up to? First off, we are still working on the hallway paint upstairs and downstairs! I changed my mind a handful of times, and repainted a few things in different colors, and finally think I figured out what were going to do, I just have to finish…we have 10 foot ceilings downstairs, and 9 foot upstairs, so it has been a pain in the behind to get up and down a ladder and repaint several times! But now I want my parents to see it finished in person not in pictures, so y’all will have to wait until Christmas for pictures, sorry! 😛 (Well thats not completely true…there are pictures below of the color we chose in the hallway, but its what we did in the picture molding along the top that has not been revealed just yet 😉 at least that unmellow yellow is gone! yeehaw!

Chris has also caught up on the yard, OFFICIALLY, and is ready to tackle the fall leaves! We converted our lawn mower into a mulcher, so he is just going to run them over weekly, and done! No raking for us! We also spread winter grass seed so we can have a nice lush green lawn! I also wanted to share pictures I took last week of our beautiful “Tea Olive Tree”! This tree is in our back corner of the yard, and looks like a Holly Tree in the leaves, but instead of berries, it blooms these stunning white flowers up and down every branch that smell AMAZING! They smell like a jasmine and it perfumes the whole house, you can even smell it across the street! We were told by the previous owners who had a professional arborist say it was the largest Tea Olive Tree they had ever seen! Pretty special! We also have our camellias starting to bloom, which are a winter blooming flowering shrub. We found out that we have very old camellias on the property, 3 of them, two white and a coral, that are probably 10-12 feet tall each, maybe 8 ft wide, and are most likely as old as the house! The oldest camellia in the United States is here at the Middleton Plantation that was brought here from a french gardener 200 years ago! I will take more pictures of them when in full bloom, just beautiful!

Camellia flower, and you can see the tree next to the house on the far left in the big picture!

We also cleaned up these sconces in the entry hallway, they were a funky pewter color, and the glass shades were faded and foggy, so I updated them with an oil rubbed bronze paint, and found these mercury glass shades at lowes, and tada, looks so much better.

Before:

After:

So now that Fall has arrived, we have some things we want to get done with the house before winter comes! We are going to have a chimney sweep come out next week and clean our 7 fireplaces, and let us know which ones are gas or wood burning, which ones we can use, which ones need fixed, so on and so forth…hopefully it is nothing major, but for fireplaces that haven’t been burned in maybe 2 decades, I am preparing for the worst. We are also hiring an electrician to come install a new bathroom fan/heater in the master bathroom, the old one was broken when we moved in, and with the old wiring Chris doesn’t want to mess with it. And lastly, and the most dreaded, is we might be completely replacing our electrical breaker box…I know….NOT FUN! But we knew eventually it would have to be done, and there have been so many different people working on it before and after we bought the house, who all did different things in there they probably shouldn’t have, it just isn’t safe long term, it is truly a hot mess, and we want to be safe not sorry! So we have a safety inspection tomorrow for all the electrical in the house, and then we are going to do a workup on what work needs to be done! The good news hopefully in all of that, is one, we will definitely feel safer about it all, and two, our house will have updated electrical so we can get a deeper discount on our insurance which would be $1000 less a year, so it will be worth the update and eventually pay for itself! if you have ever had to replace an electrical box please let us know below in the comments on what it cost you, just so we can compare to what they quote us!

(Chris and I took this picture on our 4th wedding anniversary (11 years together) last month!

Well you are now up to date on what is going on in our world! If you have any fall plans or projects you are working on I would love to hear about them! Have a Happy Halloween!

Lacquered life is a lifestyle blog created by Charleston resident and interior designer Olivia Mitchell Brock. The blog features content related to interiors, architecture, preservation, entertaining, and travel.